What is our conscience?  Modern psychiatry tells us that it is the seat of moral decision, that indefinable "presence" in us that helps us weigh and assess the factors in a given moral choice.  Aswe moderns would have it, our conscience is therefore something that we do not create, nor is it something that we can destroy; it just is, talking to us--taunting us, some might say--about  about our choices.
     Such is the Western way.  From the days of the Greeks, those harbingers of reason and rationality on which we base nearly all of our government and science, and their notion that the conscience, suneidasis, is that by which we understand the moral contingencies, good and bad, about existence, we look to ourselves as the basis for our moral decisions.
     Not that we shouldn't; after all, we are rational and reasonable creatures.  We have the ability and power to make choices about our lives.
     The Hebrews, perhaps the most thoughtful of the people of the ancient Near East, believed this, too.  But they believed something else as well.  They believed that we derive our moral knowledge ultimately not from our own subjective experience but from the revelation of God.  For the Hebrew, to be moral was to be in relationship with God, to make moral choices on the basis of the thoughts and ideas he revealed to them.  Relationship was the starting point for moral decision.
     The Hebrews had a point.  Although we in the West have been generally successful in coming to grips with our moral dilemmas on the basis of individual and corporate consensus, we continue to encounter issues for which there are no easy answers.  While being in relationship with God may not produce ready answers, for trust in God comes with ambiguities of its own, it does tell us that, fallen and limited beings that we are, we cannot legitimately trust ourselves, and ourselves only to make moral decisions.  If we do, we are making them on the basis of ourselves, and we are, to reiterate, limited beings.  We assert moral probity on the basis of our moral probity (just as science constructs its propositions on the basis of the rationality and order it assumes about itself), hardly a reasonable construct.
     Again, relying on revelation carries its share of difficulties.  Yet if we are to assert the presence of value, then we cannot do without revelation:  conscience is only rational if it understands that it is only so because the universe is meaningful, and that it receives--the revelation of a meaningful God.